


A Patient Anasthetised Upon a Table

by toujours_nigel



Category: Night Watch - Sarah Waters
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 17:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/852057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel





	A Patient Anasthetised Upon a Table

**Author's Note:**

  * For [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/gifts).
  * Inspired by [gentle into that good night](https://archiveofourown.org/works/827682) by [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel). 



The thing is, really, that she’s never hated Julia, even when it would have made everything so much easier. For years she has felt a species of shock at the betrayal of it all, a clawing hurt that Helen had left, had left her, had left their home, had left their life together. But she’s never hated her, or Julia. Some days she thinks with a detached inquisitiveness which she knows should surprise and perhaps frighten her, that the thing inside her which should feel has been left behind in the rubble of war, in some overlooked corner of a building broken in the Blitz.

For three years she has wandered from flat to flat and the streets of London aimlessly; she’s picked up women and watched movies, both with the same detachment. It is as though there is a glass box surrounding her, through the walls of which the lives of others penetrate only dimly. Something closer than a box, draping her form: a veil or a shroud. She has left all the living pieces of her in the war, and the Kay who has continued lacks all the immense vitality of the Kay who lifted the headless torso of a child, who drove ambulances in the Blitz, raced horses with her brothers, danced in a white dress at her debut, faced boarding-school without tears, fell jubilantly out of trees and broke her foot.

The woman she was before the war and during it has given way to a tired slob whose only nod towards neatness is to keep the unpacked boxes in her rooms neatly stacked. It has helped to talk to Mickey, to remember that the life she remembers in glorious dreadful flashes was real and was shared and was lived by others beyond the confines of her skull: it has made the old forgotten yearned-for Kay Langrish unfold from her long crouch and stand on unsteady legs looking about at this strange new world; it has helped more than she dares tell Mickey, for fear that they will embarrass each other into another long bout of silence.

But they have not met yet, the two women who make up her life, and she thinks that they would not know what to make of each other, she thinks that they would hate each other, she thinks that she does not know how other people bear the change that has been effected in their lives by peace. There were other women about, after all, in ambulances and fire services and offices and the rooms in Bletchely Park about which one is not supposed to speak. Have they gone back, all, to their rooms and houses and husbands? It is impossible that there aren’t any others like her, but even Mickey seems quite content in her life, and none of the dykes she meets at The Gates miss the war even for the sense it gave them of integration.

Perhaps it is only that she is strange in ways that go beyond her liking of women and of suits and guns and strong liquor and all the accruements of a gentleman’s life. But she has felt correct in her skin before the War, in childhood while her mother’s friends died in their own War, or in school bellowing orders, or in lavish rooms being told that she was beautiful by boys she’d been a child with, or in her first flat alone in London. It is only now that she feels strange, like the spine has been ripped from her by a bomb and she has been mending and making do for the better part of three years, like her vitals have been wrenched out of her.

But she has never hated Julia, through it, and it feels strange to even have been asked the question. She has loved Julia, envied Julia, felt betrayed by Julia, wanted in fits of anger to grab Julia’s glossy hair and ram her lovely face into a wall till it shatters. But not hatred, that insidious emotion that creeps through your veins and ventricles and differs so from cleansing rage or sorrow. She has mourned Helen, and she is still, will for years more: the sweetness of her smile, her eager joy about giving surprises and her childish anxiety about getting them, the curve of her hip where the skin felt like sun-warmed silk, the taste of her most secret folds. She lost love, when she lost Helen, the terrible tragic potential of it, the years of domesticity lying in wait for them, every silvery hair on Helen’s fair head, every wrinkle that will crease her skin, the way her hands would grow bone-thin and papery and her bones feel bird-like and light in an embrace: middle-age and a slow decline into senescence, curled together in death-bed, unmoored by society and unmourned by non-existent progeny. It makes her breath come short in the dimness of the cab, thinking of Helen in the rubble where she’d found her, Helen through six years of aging, Helen at sixty, at seventy, serene in death; it makes her gasp.

In the orange glow of the next streetlight Julia turns to look at her, eyes bright and tense. Her shoulders are drawn up near her ears, and the rubies flash and wink going from light to clinging darkness. London about them is lit like a woman going dancing, and in the cab Julia sighs and peels one glove off her fingers and then the other, and crumples them into her purse. Her fingers look swollen, glazed by hours away from the air. Kay takes the purse from her hands and puts it between her body and the door of the cab, and then takes her hands carefully and holds them between her own. She should have worn gloves herself, but had not found white ones that were in any presentable state, and Julia’s fingers tremble in her tentative grasp. She tightens her grip to still them. Julia moans.


End file.
